Letters to the Editor
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Not exactly
have been the product not of revolutionary code but of brilliant marketing and, more important, savvy business tactics.
While it might not have always seemed "revolutionary" it was "evolutionary" and it always evolved faster than its competitors.
MS started out as #2 or lower in databases (desktop and enterprise), office apps, browsers and more. They're the standard now not just because of "marketing", but because they made their products measurably better with every iteration. When I got out of college, the standards in the industry were Paradox 3.5, Oracle, Word Perfect, Harvard Graphics and Lotus 123 and when the web started up, Netscape looked hard to beat.
Where are they now?
Access, SQL Server, Word, Excel and IE were crap when they first came out, but they worked well together, could import the competition's products and by the 2nd or 3rd or 4th version were clearly better than the competition. Sometimes the competition hasn't even made real efforts to improve. Look at Oracle (the only one really stil standing). Their product is primarily used by legacy systems and people who hate MS.
And Apple? They've been happy as a niche product for decades.
At this point, saying they're "done" is rediculous. IBM was "done" 20 years ago, but they're still around and profitable. Most anything could happen at this point. MS could reinvent itself, again. Google could falter. A new company could show up and take both their lunches or just level the playing field between them.
And at the end of the day, Google can be whatever it wants. MS still owns the desktop and office worlds.
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Microsoft technologically inferior
Microsoft has never been able to compete in areas not tied to its Windows monopoly, especially internet content. MSN? A joke. Yahoo mail dominates Microsoft's Hotmail. IPod vs. Zune? You're kidding, right?
Microsoft is a savage business competitor that has not hesitated to leverage its Windows monopoly to its advantage, but in the areas where users are free to choose and Windows dominance provides no advantage, Microsoft is nothing more than an also-ran.
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Ownership of a Worthless Market
Microsoft may in fact end up continuing to own the desktop and the office, but it's clear to anyone paying attention that:
A) Those markets are going to be worth substantially less at some point in the not-too-distant future and that
B) The real growth areas are going to be outside of those two markets
This is not an appealing landscape for today's dominant tech player.
Right now laptops are dropping into the $500 price range, and desktops are falling into the $300 price range. These aren't junky machines, either - they're pretty capable, certainly of running most typical office or home applications (apart from cutting-edge gaming). Microsoft has traditionally made its money by charging something like $100 a copy for Windows and $300 for its Office suite, which was a fairly small percentage of the cost of a $2000 computer. But in a world of $300 computes Windows is suddenly the most expensive component of many perfectly capable, brand new PCs, and Office alone costs more than some desktops.
Computer prices are going to continue to fall, putting additional downward price pressure on Microsoft's products. At some point corporate bean counters are gonna look at the price difference between a company full of new PCs with Windows and Office, and a company full of new PCs with Linux and Google Apps. They're gonna dump Windows - and especially Office, which is Microsoft's real cash cow - when they see that the other options cost less than half as much, while providing similar functionality for 95% of their users (word processing, spreadsheets and e-mail is all most users ever touch).
Due to the declining price of computing power - and its increasing miniaturization - the real action in the software world is going to be off the desktop and out of the office. The iPhone is a preview of what's to come in that space, which demands tighter integration between the software and the hardware designs, something Microsoft has never been any good at. Companies like Apple, Google and Nintendo are going to dominate this consumer-driven arena, and as these devices proliferate by the billions (literally) MS will find itself increasingly marginalized.
Microsoft isn't going away, but like IBM in the 1990s they're going to gradually become a less and less prominent player in the technology space.
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Damn it!
I switched to Yahoo mail when AOL bought Netscape and did all this annoying, screwy shit to its mail client. I can't even imagine what kind of irritating "synergies" will start showing up in Microhoo's mail client. I guess it's gmail for me in the near future.
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Billions of Apple machines?
"Companies like Apple, Google and Nintendo are going to dominate this consumer-driven arena, and as these devices proliferate by the billions (literally) MS will find itself increasingly marginalized." ?????
Apple has a long way to go before it has numbers in the billions, literally. Won't be on our lifetimes.
There are already over a billion windows machines.
Apple is a tiny, insignifigant fraction of that.
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They should have bought Ford instead of pushing that Sync crud.
MicroFord. You get software AND a free car.
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@Lynx
C'mon now, you are making too much sense. This is Salon afterall and we must make sweeping pronouncements, especially, about tech stuff and especially about the evil Microsoft. First in "How The World Works" and now in Farhad's Apple column.
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Just watch...
This will be approved before the Sirius/XM merger is finally allowed.
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stick a fork in 'em...
they're done! Just call it "HoHum"...
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Worth it?
Is Yahoo really worth 44 billion? I thought they were headed down the drain. 44 billion, really?
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Classic Machinist
"In this light, the Yahoo merger is classic Microsoft -- classic Gates. Crushed by Google in search and online ads, facing the possibility of a long-term decline in its operating system and business software monopolies (at the hands of "cloud" software like Google Apps and mobile OSes from Apple and Google and Symbian), and failing to create any competitive products of its own, the company responds by doing what it knows best -- picking up a rival at exactly the right time, a brilliant stock move.
If the deal goes through -- and there's really no reason to guess it won't -- Microsoft will have purchased Yahoo for a fraction of what it was once worth.
It will get a great deal for its small outlay, too. Microhoo would have about 30 percent of the search market, compared to Google's 60 percent, and the the second largest online ad network. In Yahoo, Microsoft is also getting the most popular e-mail, news site, finance and photo sites on the Web."
How can you not laugh? So from a business standpoint, it's a great move in terms of Yahoo's value and they get all of the stuff listed directly above but stick a fork in them, they're done, right?. Let's see, 90+% of the OS market, 95+% of the Office market and 30% of the search market and so on with the rest of the online stuff. I think it's time to take up a collection for Gates.
The problem is that Farhad thinks that the online game is the only game. He mentions MS's dominace in the other extremely profitable areas but tries to open the "possibility" of decline based on nothing more than specualtion. The truth is that it's big cash cow Office gets better with each version and that it's very unlikely that companies are going to switch from it to a mix of other applications from different providers that might provide 95% of what they already have and may or may not work together as well as Office. That's not even mentioning all of the other potential transition issues. Also, the cheaper the computers the better for the companies because it's not like they are buying them with Office already loaded. They are buying the software licenses/versions from MS and loading it onto cheaper and cheaper hardware.